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Is crowdsourcing getting old? Coke’s 24hr live session w/ Maroon 5

Last week, Coke in collaboration with Maroon 5 and peeps of the world embarked on a social experiment around music. Maroon 5 were tasked with creating a song within 24hrs with the help of you, the consumer, facilitated by Coke. The idea was called Coca C0la Maroon 5 24hr Session

The idea was highly interactive driven via Facebook, Cokes youtube channel and twitter. Clearly, I like the idea of collaborating with consumers around the creation of a song, it taps into Gen C’s need to be involved with the brand story in real time and obviously taps into Coke’s key content pillar around music.

An example of some of the tweets they received from the Coke community

They’ve cleverly weaved in a charitable outcome of the song creation as for the first 100,000 downloads of the new track from April 1, Coke will be making donations to RAIN (provision of clean drinking water to African nations), however i think they need to be more transparent on how much they’re donating.

For those who knew about it, Coke did a great job of driving real time follow factor of the idea, you could follow the band in real time ove rthe 24hr period and vote on things they were doing via hashtags eg: should they take a ‘#break’ or ‘#song’ to keep them singing/writing.. See here.

The big question for me is whether crowdsourcing has been done to death? Is there anything original here? Are consumers over it? Or are the low levels of engagement due to the fact Maroon 5 are on the way out?

It’s not as innovative as Old Spice’s ‘ask Mustafa to do something & we’ll create content’ twitter campaign, but I think it’s a pretty good attempt to foster collaboration between Coke fans and Maroon 5’s fan base.

The big question will be how much participation did this social experiment drive on a global scale? The videos on youtube all have very low levels in interaction & given Coke’s got 23million facebook fans and I was expecting far greater global engagement.